


An Invitation

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Meddling, Relationship Negotiation, Sexual Tension, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 19:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11319684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: Top secret nuclear facilities, smuggling rings, and corrupt government officials are Illya's domain.Gaby Teller's apartment is not.





	An Invitation

   

Solo’s low whistle echoes. He smooths a palm over the bonnet, the seamless curves of the chrome headlights.            

Even under the harsh glare of the parking garage fluorescents, the cherry paintwork is immaculate, every spoke of the alloys polished like fine silverware. The first time she had revealed it to them, Gaby had buffed out Napoleon’s wandering fingerprints with a chamois leather and whipped him with it.           

Cars don't hold Illya's attention, but her diligent care had. This machine is her weekends, her evenings. He envies anything she could come to love more.           

“Must be worth a fortune,” Solo muses.           

“Which is every reason not—” Illya seizes his wrist. “What are you doing?”           

“Commandeering the vehicle.”           

“Typical.” He snatches the picking wire from his partner’s hand. “You think like a dog. She will kill you.”            

“You have a better idea? I’m all ears.” Solo takes a second, identical pick from his jacket pocket, rolls it between his fingers. “She’s deliberately avoiding us, which in my book is a far greater crime than anything she’s been up to in Prague.”           

“You have had no contact?”           

“Not a syllable.”            

Illya hums grimly. “I will search her apartment.”           

“Of course,” Solo drawls, and gives him a wry little look. It’s the look he’d worn on once discovering a tin of breath mints in Illya’s jacket. Accusatory. Smug. “Then I suppose I’ll stay with the car.”           

“You touch this car, I will kill you.”           

“You have my word.”           

“Means nothing.”           

“Just be careful,” Solo says, and Illya readies to roll his eyes, but there’s something like sincerity in it. “Low profile. I imagine she’s still receiving casseroles for your last performance.”           

Illya fiercely zips up his jacket and stalks into the stairwell. He skips the steps two at a time, gripping the railing tight.            

His last performance. Illya shrugs off the rise in his shoulders. He could do without the reminder. Gaby’s English neighbours are more intrusive than any she could have had in East Berlin. Always peeking, eavesdropping, shoving their noses where they aren’t welcome. All, of course, under the guise of concern. Illya borrows a term from Waverly to group them: they are busy bodies.           

The number of times Gaby has turned him from her door has earned him the reputation of a grovelling ex-lover, a fanatic who won’t take no for an answer. He had only been obeying orders: delivering a missing dossier, setting up her radio scanner and receiver. She’d had him slip them through the gap of her door, a security chain keeping him from glimpsing more than a three inch strip of her life behind it. Leave it on my desk next time, she’d said briskly, and locked him out.     

(His hammering of her door, demanding to set up the expensive scanner himself, had not been a proud nor welcome display.)      

Illya reaches the fourth floor and pulls his hat lower. Intruding on her yet again won’t help their hits and misses, their vicious-to-tender back and forth for the past five months. Perhaps he should have stayed with the car. Ice can only be chipped at for so long before it cracks.          

Or melts, he wonders.         

Gaby’s door is at the end of the communal hall.           

As he approaches on soft soles, Illya’s tremor worsens. For all he admires in Gaby, her tireless determination is foremost. She is never late. It is most unlike her, this absence without leaving something for her partners to think on while she's gone, some clue as to what they have to apologise for. Last time he saw her –  two weeks ago, HQ’s break room, reluctantly ‘sharing’ his breakfast pastry – they were civil. So why would she not call? Her car is here, her telephone has been engaged for hours and hours, and a single light glows through the bay window he and Solo had peered up at from the street. Enough to prove she’s up there. He can only assume the worst.           

Is she only antagonising him?            

Illya’s mind reels this way, self-flagellating and cursing her in turn, until he arrives at her door before he knows what to do with it.          

To knock would alert the intruder if she were compromised. He has decided that this is the only excuse for her absence. An attack, a break in… a kidnapping? Perhaps he is overreacting... But she has far more incentive than he or Solo to build a profile as a reliable and proficient agent, and would skip work for no less. He knows too that, after work hours, Gaby’s apartment swells with her music.  So Illya shakes out his hands, flexes his feet in his boots, and presses an ear to the door.           

Silence.           

He drops to one knee and unwraps his picking device, plugs his ears. He can’t think of a worse time to be spotted by Gaby or her bird-like neighbours, so he works fast.           

He cracks open the door by a few millimetres.           

She hasn’t applied the security chain. He ought to be thankful for it — one less complication — but it only sets his nerves flickering, a new dread in his gut.    

Illya scans the building’s communal hall a final time and slips inside the apartment, sealing the door softly behind him.           

Somewhere, a record player crackles like a dying wood fire, squeaking and hissing into nothing. The single standing lamp is dim, lighting only the empty armchair by the window. But even in such slim vision, Illya is certain of it.

There is a little foot hanging off the end of the couch.           

Illya pads closer, stepping around the record covers, magazines, and paperbacks strewn all over the floor. He prides himself on his stealth... when the element of surprise gives him the upper-hand. He can’t, however, help weighing as much as he does, and his boot does crunch through a seven-inch single and, like a stick in the heart of a wolf den, it does wake the creature on the couch, its bare foot snatched back and out of sight.

“ _Bist du das?_ "           

She twists, squinting up at him from the armrest. With his eyes still adjusting she’s little more than a silhouette, though he can see that she is sprawled on her front, with two slim fingers in the ring of an empty wine glass. Before he can scold her yet again for drinking on the job, Illya sighs quietly. The relief on seeing her is palpable, like finding oneself safely at home after staggering through the dark.      

“Yes,” cautions Illya, hoping she means him.         

Gaby huffs and buries her face back into the cushions.           

“Come on.” There’s a strange quake in his chest, wavering high and low like sound waves crossing. He crosses his arms tight. “Time to work.”

“Just barged right in,” she mutters, muffled. “Typical.” There is a shuffling of the cushions. Something falls with a rustle to the rug, followed by a _scheiße_.  “Illya, get out. I’ll be five minutes.”            

“You have had your five minutes.” He rounds the back of the sofa to shut off the hissing record player, and on his way he flicks on a side lamp.

From her brow bone to the squared tip of her nose throbs a fluorescent yellow bruise, streaked with purples and greens. On the rug, a knotted tea towel scattered with melting ice.           

“What is that.” The whites of his eyes are surely showing but he doesn’t try to soften them. He can’t look away. His hands thrum so bloodlessly he has to clench his fists to regain feeling.            

Gaby rubs her face and makes a resigned little sound. Her voice is sweetly hoarse with sleep, “Solo called it an occupational hazard.”            

“He knew about this?”            

“Oh, don’t sulk.” She peers up at him dully, brushes through her mussed hair with her fingers. “I asked him not to say anything. Tonight is a recon, not a bloodbath. The last thing we need is you bulldozing through the streets to defend my honour.”            

Illya opens his mouth to protest, closes it. He wanted to break into your car, he could counter. Something petty to shake this partnership they’ve strung up in his absence. Of course Solo had kept his meddling mouth shut just to get him to come up here. Always trying to usher him into Gaby’s space, thinking he knows best. And he’d fallen for it too, again, so tunnel-visioned and oblivious to anything beyond finding her.          

Illya presses his lips into a tight line to avoid saying as much as he'd like. He is not willing to admit how much protocol he has overlooked just to get here as fast as he could. 

Gaby touches her nose gingerly.           

“What,” he says, “you thought I would not notice this?”            

“I thought you would knock,” she says pointedly. “I overslept. Solo was supposed to call me. There is enough costume makeup in this flat to disguise a decapitation.”            

Illya’s jaw aches for the sharp grind of his teeth. “Where else?”            

She rolls her eyes, pulls her knee up to her chest. A dark red rivulet scores down her shin below the hem of her capris, a streak of a welt scabbing over. It turns his stomach. Of course he has seen far worse, but never on her. It’s a strike down her skin, pulsing with pain. He wants to touch it. Cool it with ice until it sloughs away, suturing the skin beneath.           

Solo will be accosted for hiding this.          

“Where is the dressing?”             

“I knew you would fuss. It’s not as bad as it looks.”            

He rounds the coffee table in three long strides. “Show it to me."           

“No!” She yanks the hem back down.           

The cut still peeks out like a forked tongue. Had she fallen on the curb? Grazed it on her car door sill in her hurry? It’s a true slice down the length of her shinbone, cleaned up but devoid of any dressing.           

A restlessness rises up his back, across both shoulders.  “This happened in Prague?”           

Gaby tugs at her sweater, ignoring him, and sweeps a finger under her eyes. If she’s embarrassed to be found like this she shouldn’t be. There’s a soft blush high on her cheekbones for her deep sleep and, despite it all, Illya only wants her to fall back into it. He knows how difficult it is for her to find sleep.    

And, in sleep, he could douse the wound in iodine without a kick to the chest...      

“It happened tonight?” he presses.          

“That’s none of your business.”          

“You will write a report in the morning.”            

“Oh, just pass me my coat.”            

Illya’s grumbling is cut short when Gaby skirts closely by him, heavily favouring her left leg. She braces against the back of the couch to scour through the duffel bag beside it. 

She considers something heavily, stopping for a moment. When she does make up her mind, tilting her chin high and turning her back on him, she adopts her typical nonchalance that drives him mad. “Well, since you’ve invited yourself in, get my tactical will you? In the wardrobe, behind the shoe boxes. Probably.”            

Illya firmly shakes his head. “No. You will not work effectively tonight. You cannot walk the length of your apartment.”            

“I don’t need to walk. I’m the driver.”            

“Don’t be absurd.” He snatches her coat from the hook by her front door. He checks the label, grimaces, and curses Solo’s crass sartorial input. His feet are taking him toward the bedroom. “If we are compromised? We are trailed, your vehicle identified. Solo and I are inside, and you are approached by the guards. Like this, you can’t leave the vehicle or defend yourself. You drive, they shoot. At you, your tyres. What next?”           

Gaby scoffs. “I escaped you with two flats, didn’t I?”            

Something icy slides through Illya’s chest. East Berlin is a whip he flinches for even now. It’s a cruel jab, and if her raised brow is anything to go by then she certainly knows it.

Before he can stop himself he’s in the doorway of the room Gaby had wafted a careless hand at, with a bath towel under his boots and a robe dangling off the doorknob. Her bedroom — a bomb site. He scans the chaos for her wardrobe. Both doors are open, and far more lies on the floor than hangs within it.           

Her telephone lies on the bed, baby blue handset knocked off its hook and ringing into nothing—there it is, the machine that has fretted away years off his lifespan. Illya cracks the handset into its cradle and drops it not-at-all gently on her bedside table.           

He’s idly straightening a pillow and tugging the corner of her feather duvet when he realises what he’s doing. How does she live like this? Her records are her most prized possessions, yet they’re scattered over the floor like poker chips. He’d hoped the state of her desk at HQ was a product of haste, not of habit.          

He folds Gaby’s coat over his shoulder to shake out his hands, and hunts through her wardrobe for her tactical garb. Why? He won’t let her go. 

But she had asked him to do this for her.

Ridiculous.           

“Is it there?”          

“You live like wild animal.”           

Gaby leans against the door frame, glaring. She pulls off her sweater and throws it on the bed, limping over in a blouse he hasn’t seen before. Certainly it isn’t another of Solo’s offerings; it’s cotton, pale, functional, and it’s sleeveless, complementing the shape of her arms. The collar is loose, with three buttons open over the deep tan at the base of her throat.            

Illya turns away. But he can’t miss the rise of her shampoo when she elbows him aside, burying her arms in the wardrobe for herself and rifling with a more effective vigour. 

Illya balks at the bloom spreading over her back.        

“You are bleeding,” he says.        

“Oh, that,” she offers airily, and tugs at the hem of her blouse. It’s a poppy between her shoulder blades, fresh and wet and vivid. “I couldn’t reach it. I showered until it ran clear... It must have opened up when you broke into my home without invitation.”           

Illya glowers down at the back of her head. “And you neglect this? Who was it?”           

“You should see them now.”           

“Them!”            

“Only two,” she says. “They’re dead.”           

“Good,” Illya mutters, meaning it. “Where are your medical supplies?”           

Gaby throws him a withering look over her shoulder, but something she sees in him stops her from biting twice. It softens her brow and lowers her eyes. She reaches for him, making a beckoning gesture with her fingers.       

At a loss, Illya has no idea where to put his hands but to keep them stiffly by his sides. He knows her well by now; she is a spectacular actress, and he has learned when to suspect a trick.     

Gaby huffs in frustration and only snatches her coat from his shoulder, tosses it over an arm chair. “In the bathroom,” she says, and returns to dragging her black jumpsuit from its crumpled tangle. She turns it the right side out again, lays that on the chair too, and begins unbuttoning her blouse.            

Illya darts for the bathroom.           

Infuriating, thinking she could disguise such blatant injury! Still so stubborn. This behaviour will compromise the entire team. What use is she if she bleeds out in the driver’s seat? She’d do it, too. Bleed out over her prized upholstery before ever admitting she should have stayed at home, hiss through bloody teeth for him to leave her alone before ever confessing he was right.          

Which he is.          

All of the time.           

He’s surprised to find the medical kit out on the counter, and discarded iodine swabs in the waste basket. The room is perfumed and warm with the scent of her soap, the pink floor-to-ceiling tiles softened by neat stacks of fluffy towels, glass bottles of pearlescent baubles, milks, mousses. It’s the most orderly room he’s seen yet. So she cares for cars and bubble baths, he thinks. The knowledge settles in a soft corner of him, as useless and precious as a jewel.            

Illya soaks a clean wash cloth and washes his hands thoroughly under the too-hot water to thaw them, to rid the tremors still wracking through his fingers.         

When he returns Gaby is perched on the corner of the bed. Not in her tactical — a decision he imagines she did not surrender to lightly — but in a clean blouse, pulled down her arms to bare her upper back, which she has turned to him.      

His favourite dresses of hers frame the line of her back like a painting. The fashionably high hemlines too, chosen not only for her ease of movement but for their aesthetic merit, criminal to hide her favourite features under Solo’s matronly two-pieces. Illya knows she likes them. After showcasing three such ensembles in the field, Solo had recognised the pattern of his taste and given him one of those infuriating little smirks.

So he has seen this much skin before. Besides the welt down her back, it is nothing new. The gradient of a tan carved by a complicated bathing suit. The dark freckle tucked under the wing of her left shoulder blade. Both there, both as destructive to him as usual. It is the context, he thinks, that halts him in the doorway this time, for just a moment. If he wasn’t so blinded by irritation, he might have been baffled by her like this. It is not bafflement now, but something else entirely. He reasons that it’s the room itself: the sight of her on an unmade bed, her hair loose, surrounded by the chaos of clothes and cushions, as if this scene had been composed by a very specific type of urgency.     

But that is where the association ends. She has left no opportunity to misread the room. The set of her posture is an offence: petulant, warning him that this is all a pointless exercise and nothing good will come of it.          

Still standing, Illya passes the kit over her shoulder and scrunches the wet cloth in his fist.          

There is a small problem.         

“I need—” he says, too quiet, and clears his throat to try again. “It is under… the wound is underneath. Some of it. You have to…”         

Gaby’s head tilts back with exasperation, and the roll of her eyes feels like a punishment. She reaches back to unclasp her brassiere, shrugging the straps half way down her arms and holding the front in place with a forearm over her chest.          

This is new.     

“Not a bullet,” Illya tries, and finally sits on the edge of the bed behind her. The frame creaks. He closes his eyes, suffers.        

“Clearly.”           

“A knife?” Gaby doesn’t say anything. He applies a gentle pressure to the skin surrounding the cut, and she shifts around it. Her shower has cleared away any debris there might have been and, save for the mix of dried and the freshly shining blood there, it looks safe; all he must do is clean up the blood and cover the wound to let it heal itself. But an impending infection would be tender, so he taps two cool fingertips there, just in case. “Does this hurt?”           

“No.” But she rolls her shoulders, and can’t stifle her flinch when he presses the wet washcloth flat to the drying blood at its edges, peels it back again. “It isn’t that bad,” she insists.          

“It looks bad.”          

“Everything looks bad to you.”          

Illya breathes, counts to ten. “You did not go to medical.”           

“Like I said, the bleeding stopped.”           

“It could be infected.” He lifts the cloth, watches a droplet of blood dilute down her spine in a trickle. He catches it with his thumb before it reaches her lowered blouse. “You know this.” 

And he knows better than to try to help her himself. Illya has the power to contact U.N.C.L.E’s medical staff. If he were a better man, he would leave her in their capable hands and speed off to the factory with Solo, postponing his concern until they meet with Waverly to debrief. Instead he is sitting on her bed, trying to stifle this unique strain of helplessness he hasn’t felt since he was a boy. The bruise on Gaby’s nose will still show through her pressed powder, just as his mother’s had. Gaby's back will scar, just like the underside of his mother’s arm (those ditches of flesh, four half-moons, spotted on a day too hot to wear a cardigan, too frantic to remember cosmetics). The ghost has strapped him into a pair of blinkers, haunting him now, and he is blind to anything beyond it. He refuses any solution but his own. Now, he can help.   

He should not be so selfish. But even after all his conditioning, what Illya feels still fights harder than what he knows.     

“Just get on with it.”           

Gaby doesn’t wince when he lays down the cloth again, though Illya knows this degree of pain intimately. He takes in the line of her back, her defensive shoulders. What does she stand to gain? Pride? Credibility? Gaby has never tried to impress them.           

Her shoulders hunch higher. Illya rests the heel of his hand on her back, the other on her shoulder to still her, and Gaby flinches for what she knows to come next. This is the part that has never bothered him. The clean burn, the pure sting. He has come to learn that it will do him good. But Gaby is ready for fire and spit.          

“Try to relax.”           

She laughs at him, and with it he sweeps the wet cloth directly down the cut. Her derisive little scoff becomes a hiss and Illya tightens his grip on her shoulder to keep her still.  

“Sorry,” he says.            

A shudder pulls through her. She clears her throat. “Is that it? Is it done?”           

She knows it isn’t. “No,” he says anyway. “Once more.”            

“Well, make it quick,” she mutters. “I don’t trust Solo to babysit.”           

Illya stifles a small smile. He steadies his hand again.         

“It was my fault,” she blurts, and glances over her shoulder. It’s an anticipatory panic he has seen one hundred times over in interrogations; a confession borne of pain, intimidation. Illya immediately lightens his touch. “Some goons manhandled me for getting too close to the mark, caught me bugging his collar. They showed me to the door. I blew my cover.”            

“You took them out,” Illya supplies. He tries not to dwell on how close too close might be, and glares at the wound instead. A blade, definitely. The clean point and its drag as she had been shoved to the ground, and her shin split open messily on the curb — it plays out for him in startling, maddening colour.     

“They drove off the bridge when they chased me out of town.” She shrugs, grimaces for the stretch of her torn skin. “It was my right of way.”           

“It always is,” Illya says, and watches the apple of her cheek rise with a reluctant flicker of a smile. “Ready?”           

“No. But I suppose you will do it anyway.”           

“Sorry,” Illya says again, and does. The rest falls out in German curses. “It will be over soon,” he assures her and, although it only seems like an empty thing to say, it will be. There will be a flat, silvery scar like the tail of a sunburst, nothing more.        

When she doesn’t do it herself, he reaches around her for the fresh cotton wadding in her lap. There is a pinkish blush around her eyes, tinted high on her cheeks. She sniffs sharply, and it’s so close he startles. She doesn’t move when he leans over her shoulder, and she neglects to hand him the kit; she’s so deliberately still, in fact, that Illya considers whether she might mean to hinder him here. Here, where she overwhelms with the metallic haze of the supplies, of her blood. But it’s the warmth radiating from the curve of her neck that stills him. The soft and neutral scent of her skin, her subtle chamomile soap.         

Illya picks up the cotton dressing with purpose, forcing a host of unprofessional thoughts out of his head.         

And yet.        

He unfurls the band of cotton, tugs at its corners, biding his time.      

What if he had been her partner in Prague and she had never been outnumbered? And so, what if he wasn’t here tonight for work? Would they drink together? Without a wounded leg, would she dance? With Gaby these things come in pairs. Watching her fix her hair now, so that it doesn’t fall over his hand on her back, his mind begins to wander.  

They are so rarely alone together — hotel rooms or bars, almost exclusively — that it is almost impossible to tell what to expect. Illya tries to put the  pieces together, form a conclusion from the little he already knows. In hotel rooms she wears a sensible choice of pyjamas for a shared suite, and in bars she wears the couture he has picked out for her. He can’t glean much insight from that. But he does know that, in hotel rooms and in bars, she always eliminates any threat of a dull evening, and is always challenging him in a bored sort of way to misbehave... That’s unconditional. Inevitable. What then, in the privacy of her own apartment, with every choice her own to make, from her clothes to how they might pass the night away, would she dare him to do? And what would he say yes to? Illya decides, with the turn of her head now, and the tousled wave behind her ear untwisting to rest on her bare shoulder, that he would say yes to anything.         

“I didn’t want you to come in,” Gaby tells him.          

Illya bristles. There it goes, just as it always does. “You were late. Solo was concerned.” At least, he had pretended to be.          

“Only Solo?”          

Illya pinches the wadding in his fingers. “Our window for this assignment is closing.”          

Gaby’s laugh is quick and harsh.          

“What?”          

“Just hurry up, Illya. We don’t have much time, after all.”          

Illya stares at her back, lips pursed. He will never get hold of what he wants to say to her. Even if all the walls between them were torn down, he would still stutter and stumble. Always tip-toeing around one another, or meeting each kindness with fierce barbs to push the other away. He would like his precision laser now, to slice through every link and cut through. He wishes she could speak Russian the way he needs her to, or he German the way he must, so he could close his eyes and open his mouth and let the honesty tumble out.         

But he has never been that way. And Gaby would not appreciate such a flood. So he decides to be as blunt as she will allow — as blunt as she is to him, if that’s what she wants. No matter what strange acrobatics his heart is putting him through tonight, he has not forgiven her behaviour.     

He squares the gauze on her back, takes the first strip of medical tape. Gaby readies another, holds it over her shoulder. He pretends it’s only routine, rather than something that sets off a new shake to his fingers.           

“If you spoke plainly, I would not ask so many questions,” Illya begins, but his heart thuds unpredictably, throwing off any chance he’d had at seeming impartial. Instead it is defensive, petulant. He takes the second strip of tape from her pinched fingers, tries to focus on applying it evenly. “If you had gone to medical, already we would be on location. If Solo had not kept your injuries to himself, we would not have waited for you. I have been slowed by you both, by your childish secrecy. So I am here, wasting your time, because I must find out what happened to you before you waste any more of mine.”          

Gaby snaps around as briskly as her wound allows. It’s an intimidating glower, as infallible and impressive as the paintwork of her car, forbidding anything from coming too close. “You didn’t think for a moment that I would like to choose who comes into my home?” she challenges, searching him for any semblance of understanding. “This isn’t East Germany."          

Illya stares.          

"Don’t think me stupid for caring about this." She expects an accusation of drama, of neurotics, but she carries on before he can say another word. "To think, I was actually going to invite you in myself! But of course you just barged right in. I bet you think I live like this all the time.”              

His chest is tight. How many bugs had littered her home in East Berlin, buried under light switches and shoved into wallpaper seams? How many officers had barged in on her there, unannounced, expecting impeccable order and modest, Party approved possessions? How many of them Russian?  In all his years it has never crossed his mind, how an intrusion might affect somebody like Gaby. She finally has an element of control: over her own visitors, her belongings, her newfound right to privacy. He is Russian, he is criticising, he is trespassing. This is far more than an oversight.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but it isn’t enough. It never feels like enough. His country’s occupation will always weigh heavier. It might lighten with each companionable silence, each night in a shared hotel room, and with every discreet game they play, neglecting the fact until it seals over like scar tissue. But it always flares up again, as abruptly as this, once their patience with one another grows thin; one cruel, bitten-off accusation in the middle of a dispute to remind them of what they are, who they were. Why they will never be what he would like for them to be. “Solo should have come here,” he murmurs. “He should not have used this as… opportunity.”          

“Opportunity? For what?”          

Illya balks. “No. I… He is American,” he deflects uselessly, realising quickly how stupid it sounds.         

Gaby flattens her glare of a smile, arches a brow at him instead. “You know they were no strangers either. BND, BfV, the Stasi, the Russians, the Americans... They came and went as they pleased. Are you done?” she fastens her brassiere back together with clumsy fingers, begins shrugging the blouse back up to her shoulders.           

“It is nothing to be ashamed of, being compromised on mission,” he tries. “You were outnumbered.”          

“I’m not ashamed.”          

“You will not talk about it.”          

“Because it’s over. What good is it to complain now? I failed, that’s it. Next task.”          

“It was your first solo operation.”          

“Second,” she corrects briskly, snapping the slim strap into place on her shoulder. “You two brawled into my path, remember?”          

Illya stops. Perhaps the shame of failure is airborne. “You fooled us,” he offers, hoping to leaven the humiliation with flattery.     

Gaby shrugs and he feels it, warm and live under the idle palm he has yet to remove. “The numbers don’t matter. I would have failed last night, with you or without you. It was a misstep.”          

Illya’s fingertips are feather light between her shoulders. “You were not scared?”          

“No. I wasn’t.”          

He nods. “But you are scared now?”          

Gaby turns to look back at him. Her eyes search in little bursts, reading him millimetre by millimetre. He realises then how quickly they have arrived here, and that she has seen everything. The guilt that lingers, the fury for that bruise marring her nose, the protective brush of his hand on her back.    

“I am ready to work, if that’s what you’re talking about.”          

That isn't what he meant. He’s scared, now. Scared of what this woman can do to him. The same sensation he felt on finding her asleep on her couch surges in his chest – a very full understanding of how a person can pluck at him and tug at every one of his nerves without meaning to. How he is, bewilderingly, glad for it; though it had once been beaten it out of him, Illya still knows that it is healthy to be afraid. It means that he has something left inside of him that hasn’t yet been soldered shut. They had missed it in moulding him: an air pocket, a fold in the clay. Here is a cause to be tender again.        

“So you’ll let me out?” she says. The cruelty in it is barely convincing. There is a new hesitance to her.           

“Next task,” concedes Illya, and he removes his hand.          

Gaby inspects his work, patting over the neat gauze and tape where she can reach. She gathers her hair over one shoulder, deliberating on something for a fraction too long.

“You want to know why I didn’t go to medical?” she says.  

Illya nods.  

“Because if they think I can’t work by myself, I will always have to work with you.”          

Illya has anticipated something like this. For a long time, Gaby’s tolerance has been wearing thin. Where he and Napoleon have come to a reluctant understanding, Gaby still hunts for excuses to work alone; she is independent, self-preserving, and it is more power than she wants her partners to have, witnessing the few shortcomings she fights so hard to hide. She hates to confess failure to Napoleon, who has a habit of playfully needling her when she is at her most irritable. And an agent’s weakness to Illya is a liability, valid reason to exclude them from the work entirely. She has accused him of it before, and he hadn’t corrected her. So she dreads it. Dreads working with him, tolerates him just barely, and can’t wait to be out of U.N.C.L.E.’s still-green stranglehold where he is ever present. He supposes he has always known it. That it was only a matter of time.     

He had not anticipated it would hurt so much to hear it.          

Gaby plants a hand on his knee. Illya jolts but she turns around and her grip tightens.    

“You do not want to work together.” Illya pulls her hand away, severing the furious warmth she bleeds into him. “This much is obvious.”          

Gaby takes his wrists instead. “God, Illya. You still don’t get it, do you?”          

Her contact stings. It’s the closest she has been in months and it’s all in pity. Like he’s a lovesick boy and she doesn’t want to encourage him anymore.           

Illya pulls away, blinking against the frown she gives him for it. “I understand.” He stands abruptly, urging her hands off his forearms. “Solo is waiting. You stay here, we complete assignment, and tomorrow you file for new partners.”          

“Dummkopf!” She grabs at his sleeve and winces for the stretch under the gauze. And then she’s scrambling to kneel up on the bed, and she’s planting her hands on his shoulders to stand on the mattress, hobbling on her bad leg. “Aren’t you going to listen to me?”          

“Gaby—”          

She stumbles in her rumpled sheets. He steadies her by the elbow but she slaps him off.  “Working with you is driving me crazy!”          

“Sit down.”         

“No! Listen to me, you... you—!” Gaby thumps his chest with both hands, flattens them there with a heavy press. Catching his expression, she soon snatches them back.    

“I will call Waverly, explain the situation,” Illya mutters, and makes for the door. “You will submit your full report in the morning.”         

And then he’s lurching forward, shoes tangling up in some Italian gown he has never approved of and crashing to the floor. The shock jolts through his hands — he won’t land on his back, not with Gaby’s knees squeezing into him like she’s wrangling a horse, throwing him down to the carpet strewn with her clothes. A boxy handbag stabs his cheek and a kitten heel digs into his kneecap. From his fingers he shakes off a sheer, flimsy thing he daren’t even look at.         

Illya rolls out of her locked legs and over in one, grabs both her arms to pin her to the floor. She blinks hard with a flicker of her eyes around the room and finally up at Illya, braced high over her, on his knees and resolutely not budging. It’s over too easily, too soon; she has more fight in her, he knows first-hand, but she won’t use it now. She is significantly slowed by her injuries. Her nose and cheeks are flushed under her bruising, her nostrils flaring as she tries to yank out of his grip.         

“Don’t fight,” he warns. He gauges whether the shine in her eyes is for pain or for fury. “Are you hurt?”         

“Solo was right. It’s like talking to a brick wall with you.”         

Illya’s frown deepens. “You discuss me?”         

“Why do you think he let you come up here, huh?” She blows a lock of hair out of her eyes and she looks wild, her fists loosening but eyes darting over him like a trapped fox. “He knows about Prague. He knows how I feel about — about visitors. He could have come up here himself and stalled so I could cover all this up. He didn’t. Because you know what he’s like, and didn’t he know we would do this? Fight like we always do?”         

“I did not fight. You jumped on me like an animal.”         

Gaby breathes deep, unable to hit him. It is the worst possible moment to glance down at her panting chest, where her blouse is still open and her skin is dark and warm. There is a freckle there, he notices, which mirrors perfectly the one on her back.     

He snaps his eyes to hers, and he knows he has been caught.      

“You‘re difficult to work with,” Gaby murmurs. “You are a distraction, Illya. That’s what I meant.”         

Like surrendering a weapon, Illya tentatively frees one of her arms. She rolls her wrist, stretches her fingers, but only lets it fall back into her hair spread out over the carpet. 

“Got it?”         

More than she knows. His heart is thudding.     

“A distraction,” Illya echoes.          

“You...” she clears her throat. “Well.”          

He has never seen her at a loss for words; she counters him without hesitance, outsmarts him before he can blink. No woman has ever challenged him like Gaby Teller. Yet here she is, hunting for the right words and buckling under them as if they bear a great weight. Struggling, just as he struggles.          

“You know exactly what I mean,” she finishes.         

“You were going to invite me here yourself.”         

Gaby colours at that, rolls her head to the side. Her nose wrinkles under its purpling bruise. Still fine and shapely, unbroken. He is glad he won’t have to set it back in place for her; he isn’t certain he could handle such a feature without making it worse.         

“When I was ready to,” Gaby admits. “Yes.”         

It is impossible to concentrate like this, his head swimming and muscles thrumming with adrenaline. Illya nods, swallows. “Soon?”          

Gaby winces with her shift on the carpet and Illya quickly releases her other arm, bracing on his hands and knees. But she only gives him a tired smile before her freed hand rises, careful, inviting him to stop her, until it comes to rest on the blond bristles at the nape of his neck.         

Illya blinks hard under his furrowed brow, and she scratches through his hair. It takes every inch of him to suppress a shiver.         

“You—” he sighs.         

“Yes?” She tilts her head, taking him in with a sleepy warmth that has Illya go weak, threatening any intention he has of merely hovering over her like this. Always hovering, always something between them. Rather he wants to rest here, lay weight on her and feel hers under him. He closes his eyes and before he knows it Gaby’s breath is on his neck and he almost lurches up, mortified, but this is Gaby’s work, not his. She is pulling him down to her. His forearms are flat to the carpet now, his knees pacing back. In his bewilderment he still gathers enough sense to brace his weight, careful not to flatten her. Only, now her thigh is grazing over his waist, and her calf is curving around the small of his back, and she is pulling him into the cradle of her hips, heavy, and as close as he can get, as if she wouldn’t mind if he did.         

Illya loses his mind. “Gaby…”      

“Mm?”      

“Y-you should not work tonight,” he manages, ducking from her parted lips to breathe it into her neck.         

She deflates under him. Her sigh is heavy in his hair, and it lifts him to peer cautiously down at her. She isn’t angry. Disappointed, perhaps. Unsurprised. But how he still wants... Her hand is loose in the splay of her hair, while the other is still miraculously curled over his nape, close enough to soothe his electrified skin there, loose enough to let him go. He needs her to hold him down, he realises. Hold him down so he can take without guilt. Perhaps be taken without mercy.            

“You’re impossible.”         

Illya presses his forehead to the carpet. The unfurling parts of him close back in. He avoids her eye because his own are darting again, hunting for something steady. With another sigh from her he feels doors closing, stopped time beginning to tick again. He is impossible. This is impossible, and he will never have it for himself.         

“It is so hard to work with you,” Gaby murmurs, the soft break in her voice humming over his ear. Illya closes his eyes to it. “You know, I still have a reputation to build in U.N.C.L.E. I’m not the CIA’s pet project, the KGB’s favourite. I have to work twice as hard as you to be taken seriously.”         

“You are U.N.C.L.E.’S best.”    

Gaby hums shortly. “I need to concentrate, Illya, to prove myself here. And this?” she pushes into his hair, twirling her fingers at his crown. “This is a distraction. A bad idea, all of this. And you... well, I know I distract you, too.”         

She waits for his reluctant nod. Then her smug hum travels down his neck, though he can’t feel her lips there at all. He thinks of the blood between her shoulders and the slash down her shin. Unconcerned by her own wounds but a wolf mother to her vehicle — she hasn’t pushed him off her, even though that car is currently in the care of a war profiteer. She hasn’t bitten back to frighten him away, to fortify those safe boundaries of their not-quites, their almosts, which they have grown so used to. Instead she has her fingers in his hair and her inner thigh pressed against his waist and Illya, sighing his defeat into the carpet, could be the first to get up and leave. He could.         

But he won’t.        

“Say this is a bad idea.”         

“It is a bad idea,” he confirms, sincerely. But Illya is well versed in reciting what he doesn’t wholly believe, and soon the point of his nose is brushing through the soft spill of her hair, and Gaby’s eyes blissfully close.         

Illya tries to find sense in what he sees. Her closed lids, soft mouth. She trusts him with a knife wound in her back. Here is something tender left in her too, he thinks. Something the wall has missed. She keeps it very close, and he wonders if anybody else has been permitted to see it before. Very lightly, and very briefly, he braves a grateful kiss to the shell of her ear.      

“Illya,” she breathes, and that alone could kill him on the spot. “Bad idea.” She pulls him down to lay his lips to the hollow of her throat.        

He doesn’t kiss her again. He only breathes there, deep but barely controlled, and shakes his head under her closing fist in his hair. He insists, “Y-You can’t work tonight, Gaby.”        

Her slight tug sends a thrill down his spine. Illya swallows the grunt in his throat, shifts his weight discreetly.         

“Oh, hush.” Her rounded nails scratch behind his ear. “For one minute, don’t think so hard.”        

Illya huffs. “Stubborn woman.”         

She laughs, but despite its levity he feels her neck tense under the barest brush of his lips, and he decides to pursue it.         

The tail end of her nervous laughter is cut off by a very gratifying gasp when he murmurs the same rebuke in German, close enough to feel. He trails from the carpet to sweep a palm up her thigh, and is met by a pleased groan, a roll of her hips under his to settle in comfortably.        

Illya doesn’t know what comes over him. Her lowered lashes, her tilted chin, even the slow, unsteady exhale through her bruised nose... she has him forgetting everything else, abandoning any rationale that has kept him from this for so long. The mission is gone. Prague is a bad dream. The anger is exchanged for another type of heat, one that burns low and rolling. The hand on her thigh is bloodless with boyish nerves but he wants to push even closer, wants to feel her weight and the warmth of her skin, more than the strain of leaning over her, more than the taut stretch of her capris, which hours ago he could only ever have imagined.        

So, encouraged, he does.        

He traces down her bare calf, curls his fingers around her ankle. Her skin is smooth and sun dark. How might she feel wrapped around him entirely? Illya slips beneath the rolled-up hem, brushes the wound on her shin — she winces, claps a hand on his arm. His murmured apology has her breathing: _s’okay, s’okay_  and tugging at his sleeve instead, arching up to him as if he might try to get away. Here Illya feels the shift of her body with each breath, the tone of her stomach, the low sweep of her back. Holding her up against him, he is careful of the gauze and the tape, cautious when she leans back to look him in the eye, her lips truly close enough to kiss now, promising everything if he would. She pushes beneath his sweater to get a grasp on his own scars, urging him. A whisper would open a kiss. She dares him to.          

When her sigh of his name becomes a snap, “Did you hear that?”        

Illya blinks hard, lost, cheated, having just settled into a warm bed only to have the sheets ripped clean off.    

When the blaring horn breaks through the quiet again he buries his face in the carpet.         

“He has broken in,” Gaby realises, the daze in her voice cutting abruptly when she says it again. She pats beneath his sweater to get his attention, her palm warm and small between his shoulders. Illya tries to hold onto that sensation in case he never feels it again. “He has broken into my car.”

“You are sure it is yours?” he mutters hopefully. 

She gives him a look.        

“I told him that I would kill him.”        

“No,” she says, shaking her head to brush her hair from her eyes. He is pleased to find she has turned a flushed pink from cheek to chest. “Me first.”        

With her smirk, Illya chances a wistful glance at her lips. He does his best not to flex his fingers, splayed over the low curve of her back still, though surely she feels him hesitating there. Gaby peers up at the ceiling behind his head, gathering herself. He catches her swallow rise and fall in her throat, wonders if she wants him to remove his hand so she might button her blouse, get up, carry on as if none of this had ever happened. He can’t fathom how they will go on from here. He presses his palm closer with a testing, reassuring pressure. He wouldn’t mind if they never did.

If he had arrived alone, where would they be now? Solo, perhaps out with injury — a fate that awaits him shortly — unable to, however unintentionally, interrupt. A hand on cotton might be a hand on bare skin. A kiss, then, could land on lips rather than her ear or her throat or in the swathes of her dark hair. Illya’s lips thrum now, unused. He purses them and shares with Gaby a look that she mirrors right back; a look that broadcasts: yes, of course this was inevitable, what were we thinking? This was only permission to begin at a later date. They are used to it in their work, and this mission of theirs is no different. Postponed, rescheduled, standby indefinite. The words are too tame to capture the anticipation he feels now. The trepidation. If his assignment tonight were to go awry, he would claw his way out of rubble and steel with his bare hands just to sink back into this hold and finish what they’ve started.       

He must move slightly, because Gaby hums in the same way she had when he’d kissed the shell of her ear. It’s a sound he will never get used to. Her gaze is warm on him again, and she gently knocks her knee into his side.        

Her car blares like an air raid siren.       

“I suppose we should kill him before he wakes all the neighbours.”        

Illya hums grimly. “Yes. They do not forgive. Or forget.”    

Gaby shrugs, dimpled.   

With a last look, Illya tears his eyes away and lowers her to the carpet, comes regretfully back to his knees. Beneath him Gaby tucks her hair behind her ear and straightens her blouse, realising with a furtive little start that it is still unbuttoned.         

Illya averts his eyes to anywhere else in the room. The yellow armchair, her abandoned tactical wear, the high-pile rug. The bed is much larger and more luxurious than his own. The bared sheets and sleep-sunken pillows are more provocative a sight than Gaby herself, still partially dressed, so he turns back to her once she has finished tucking in her shirt.         

“Gaby.”        

Her hair is half way into a fresh ponytail, a hair slide between her teeth. She responds with a small, affirmative glance.        

“Don't work tonight.”        

Somehow she is always moving, always churning something over with a determined frown. Illya dreads her stillness.        

“Why?”       

“You know why,” he says.     

Gaby straightens guardedly, unevenly, as if hiding something heavy and stolen in one pocket. “Go on. Say it.”       

He hadn’t exaggerated the scenario he’d played for her, the myriad of ways she could be compromised in the work she does. In the front or in the back of that cherry red car, heading toward a drop point or speeding far from the ashes, he has replayed disaster after disaster over and over in his head like a zoetrope. Cut breaks, tampered wiring. Her key in the ignition triggers an explosive. A tracker in the wheel arches, its owner homing in long after he and Solo have been dispatched elsewhere. That she hadn’t caught onto his unhesitating relay of what might happen to her had been a miracle; she can’t know he frets over her as much as he does. She would consider it an insult, and call him a fretful old nanny.        

“I care,” he starts, and stops. It comes out like a question and it is alien to hear it aloud. He daren’t try again so he only carries on, a stilted line from a child training out his stutter. The emphasis is all wrong, the language strange in his mouth for something as intimate as this, but he goes on. “Care about you. Your work. So.”       

Gaby purses her lips. He waits. He wants to shout: Well! There! And flee the room, down the stairwell, with all the eyes of her angry woken neighbours on his back.       

“Alright,” she says, with an adult calm.        

Illya, once the initial shock of her compliance has worn off, gives a brief nod. He tries very hard not to cross his arms or tilt his head back, as he does when he wins. It doesn’t feel too much like winning. Not yet. It still feels like crossing a very rickety bridge. The rapids still rage below, and he won’t risk tugging on the ropes for the sake of one small mercy.       

He concentrates on standing instead, and he offers Gaby his hand to help her up.        

She takes it. “On one condition.”       

Gaby lights up at the expression on his face. She makes a show of rising by herself, barely a feather weight on his hand. Instead she has a ballerina’s control, firm in her good leg, tension in her thigh, and it takes little more than a sway between her sitting on the carpet to standing in front of him. If Illya’s face betrays how much his mind wanders at that, she doesn’t embarrass him by acknowledging it.       

“One condition,” he repeats, dry-mouthed.       

He isn’t convinced his collar needs straightening, but she plucks at the high black neckline all the same. “You come back,” she says, and gives a nonchalant rock of her head. “Alive, preferably. Tomorrow night.”       

Oh.       

“Oh,” Illya manages aloud, and stares with intense focus over her head. He flexes his hands, looks down to find the one he’d offered clasped by her slim fingers, and warming under their press.       

“Or not,” she suggests carefully, turning him back toward the living room.       

“No,” he says, nodding, taking the steps she pushes him into. Distantly the horn sounds in a string of insistent bursts. It doesn’t hasten him. He notices it doesn’t quicken Gaby either. She is in no hurry to scramble down the stairs and break Solo’s hand, and that inspires confidence; her priorities have shifted off kilter too. “No, I… Tomorrow.”       

“That’s right.”       

“Tomorrow night.”       

“That’s right.” She steers him with a poorly suppressed limp around the dropped ice, now a puddle on the carpet. The dark of her living room and the looming of her front door remind him of the cold garage, and of Solo, and of the interrogation waiting for him there. It demands a very high level of discipline not to turn on his heel and take her in his hands, lay her back down on the carpet and warm her back up.       

The door is opened, and then he is facing her in its frame, his hair brushing the timber. She peers up at him shrewdly, like he is drunk and she had told him he would be.        

Illya squares his jaw, straightens his shoulders.  "I look forward to it."       

"I'll tidy up."       

"You will rest," he instructs, regarding her lean against the door frame with disapproval. "Telephone Waverly's secretary. She will arrange medical." 

She gives him a flat look. "I can look after myself."       

"I... No, of course. But. You should be—"       

"Be careful. Got it."       

There it is. The snapping, the barbs. She seems to recognise them as soon as he does, and they both hold their heads up high, determined not to be the first to fall back on it again. A chastised little expression flickers over Gaby's face and he has no doubt she sees the same on his: here we go again. It's a self-awareness that he hopes will be long lasting. Something to tame them the next time they fly into rages at one another. Something to keep them in check.    

He’s gentled into the hallway.      

“You’ll call for another car,” she says, stepping over the threshold in her bare feet, toe to toe with him. “Break in, photograph the plans, mark the exits, and be back at HQ by 0800 to debrief.”       

Illya almost smiles.      

“I’ll handle Waverly, report the change of plan,” she says, knowing he would ask.       

It is a sacrifice of hers, withdrawing from the field for just one night. He notes the displeased twist to her mouth, the fan of her dark lashes. Her bruising, that watercolour purple-yellow beginning to swell between her eyes, has him feeling inexplicably tender.       

“He will allow you to work alone again,” he assures her. “You are highly proficient.”      

“Don’t flirt.”      

Illya wonders if touch was only permitted inside her apartment. If, stood on the threshold with her now, he could dare to lure the moment out of the confines of privacy. He has done away with fear. An invitation to visit her tomorrow night has washed everything else away. She is in a very giving mood and, in the empty corridor of this sleeping building, Illya would like to indulge again.       

He brushes over her cheek with his thumb, carefully avoiding the bruise. He registers her small surprise, caught just a fraction off-guard before leaning into it, the fading pink in her cheeks blooming again.       

And that car horn is going to find itself lodged inside Napoleon Solo one way or another.      

A door down the hall slams open, and a velcro-rolled head snaps around for the source of the incessant honking. Only Gaby’s nuisance visitor, disgracing their communal hall like a two meter shrine to the hammer and sickle, receives a bitter glare.      

Gaby suppresses a laugh, covers Illya’s quickly retreating hand to keep it on her cheek. A disgruntled huff comes just before the closing slam, and they are alone again.      

“I—” Illya tries, but the honk drones on, not once taking a breath for the entire, obnoxious blare. “I will kill him,” he finishes.      

“You might need him tonight,” Gaby murmurs, her voice buzzing along his palm. “Break his arm in the morning.”      

 

 

Napoleon Solo leans into his chair with a roll of his back, indulging the pulled muscle in his shoulder. He tips a nod at the blueprints laid out on the desk, swiped from the factory’s office shortly before it turned to ashes. “All taken care of.”  

“It ought to have been taken care of with a fair bit more care, Mr Solo,” remarks Waverly. He flicks through Illya’s attached photographs of the factory, drops them on his desk with a pat. “I believe these are now entirely useless. You made quite a mess.”  

“With all due respect, sir, that warehouse was due to be kindling. We merely... expedited the inevitable.”  

“Inevitable indeed. You’re fortunate there were no casualties.”  

“There could have been,” Illya murmurs, and Solo keeps his mouth shut.  

“Yes, Kuryakin, thank you. I suppose I ought to have expected as much without Agent Teller’s supervision.” Speaking of Gaby, he spares a thought to the outlying dossier on his desk – her report, Illya notices, just as promised. Waverly brushes away the evidence of last night’s chaos, and returns to his comfortable chair with her neatly compiled file in his hands. He peers at the two of them as if they’re a pair of unruly dogs he has only a shred of affection for, and sighs. “Gentlemen. I have plenty of apologies to make. That will be all.”  

Closing the door behind them, Solo arches a brow, looking conspiratorial. “That went well.”  

Illya is in a very forgiving mood, and has been for around twelve hours. He doesn’t have to tame a scowl, because it doesn’t occur to him. He doesn’t hold his tongue; he has nothing scathing to add. It went well. He only shrugs, and sets off for his own office.  

Napoleon is hot on his heels. “You didn’t turn me in,” he accuses.  

“No.”  

“...May I ask why?”  

“It is over,” Illya says.   

“I admire the new cavalier attitude, Peril, but it’s making me nervous.”  

“There is no need to be nervous, Cowboy. It is a new day. Clean slate.”  

Napoleon looks at him as if he’s speaking Dutch. “What did she do to you?”

Illya smiles.   

With that, his partner grows earnest. There is a line between his brows, and several crinkling above it, something Illya puts down to another rare bout of moral discomfort. Illya hasn’t seen it since Rome, where Solo had insisted on smacking between his shoulders to have him cough up black dock water. He lets him wrestle with it for a while before stopping by the cooler.   

“You know, Gaby told me not to tell you.”  

“And so you sent me to her apartment directly.” Illya hums, takes a sip from his too-full cup. “I am unfamiliar with this technique.”  

“Well somebody had to do _something_. You’ve been dancing circles around each other for months. Even I’m getting dizzy... The poor girl.”  

When Illya had returned to the garage he had looked on his partner with a latent sort of irritation, one that that only buzzed against the blurred borders of him like a bee against a screen door. Napoleon had stood bewildered, bristling up in anticipation of the oncoming brawl, while Illya had only opened his communicator and requested a new driver. At the time, he’ll admit that the dread in Solo’s usually unflappable features was payment enough. Since then, Illya’s red mist has become more of a pinkish haze, and he can’t find any reason at all to fight when a ceasefire has been met, and dinner set in stone for later on this evening.  

Illya drops his paper cup in the bin and sets back off down the hall. He is right, of course. Somebody had to do something. Solo’s endless meddling does get under his skin, but he can’t find his usual desire to crack his knuckles or clench his fists, to threaten Napoleon into talking himself out of this. Perhaps, deep down, he is even thankful for it all. The push, the shove; being thrown in at the deep end is all it took. He supposes this is forgiveness. Besides, his palm still thrums with the brush of Gaby’s goodnight kiss there, and he wants to keep it for himself.  

“Let me make it up to you,” Napoleon ventures. “Tonight. Drinks are on me. We’ll go to that horrible little shack you like. Maybe they’ll let us sit on chairs instead of buckets.”  

“I have plans.”  

Napoleon clicks open Illya’s office door for him. “Good God, Peril.”  

Illya’s smile is full and warm, which only serves to deepen Solo’s frown. So he settles for a vengeful clamp on Napoleon’s wounded shoulder, before brushing past him and into his office. “Come on, Cowboy. Next task.”  

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have absolutely no idea how wound care works in any way shape or form but ten minutes before publishing this I decided to have an anxious google, and turns out that, uhhhh, I was wrong about absolutely everything I ever thought I knew lmao... curse the movies, the novels, the plays! Turns out you shouldn't just dunk your bleeding faves in a vat of rubbing alcohol solution and hope for the best. I know this trope can be awash with inaccuracies which, really, shouldn't matter too much in terms of Story, but I wanted to work with the guys and gals around here who actually Know What They're Talking About (everybody here but me), rather than against them out of sheer stubbornness. So! please note that I have no idea what I'm on about... but, honestly? Gaby and Illya could rub mayonnaise in any wound of mine and I would thank them for it. 
> 
> I've been meaning to say, too! I've been around, peepin', absorbing every fic that graces this site with a desert-like thirst these days and: I miss you all!!! Aren't we all so busy lately?? The past few days have been a GIFT on tumblr regarding little drabbles and fun tags and chats about these idiots, but I've been fretting over the minor gallya dry spell we've had for the past few months (myself included!! don't think i've forgotten about my WIP - I promised myself I'd never leave a work hanging, and am ashamed of myself every day...), and I hope that I'm really not the only one who's still lurking here in dead silence, still loving this film v passionately while forced to postpone working on any fic due to Real Life. Hope that we're all just hanging out, nervous to post, nervous to start, but still ravenous for more tmfu garbage together. Also, hope this doesn't sound ungrateful for the fics we have had recently: I'm hooked on a whole bunch of new WIPs and new writers right now, too! But you are all missed!! I miss your works and our conversations and funny little ideas. I'm [on tumblr ](http://www.armoldhammer.tumblr.com)(where I make no mention of this account to anybody but those I know from here, and live a life of utter secrecy, but am still very embarrassing), if ever you want to chat about anything at all! 
> 
> Much love xx


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